AND grew up in a 200-year-old cottage in South Gloucestershire in southwest England. My parents spent 4 years (1981-1985) renovating the cottage to a habitable condition, because it had been empty for several years, the last resident was an elderly lady.
The original house only had two rooms upstairs, both were bedrooms where you had to walk through one to get to the other. My dad added a bathroom and another bedroom at the back of the house. He also added a landing so that each room could be entered separately.
When we moved in, strange things started happening. My parents had one of the bedrooms at the front of the house, the other was the guest room, and I had a modern bedroom at the back of the house.
In the mid-1980s, my grandparents came from Yorkshire with an aunt who was living in America at the time. My grandparents stayed in the spare bedroom and my aunt stayed with me at the bottom of my bunk bed.
After everyone went to sleep, my aunt woke up to the sound of my bedroom door opening. My door was typical of an ancient cottage, with a latch that you press on the outside and a lever on the inside lifts up, allowing you to then push the door open.
The door opened, then slowly closed. My aunt called out, “Hello, is anyone there?” Without answering, she put the water in the draft and went back to sleep. A while later she woke up in the bed shaking badly, of course she thought I was having fun and asked me to stop. Realizing I was sound asleep, she shouted, “Whoever you are, just stop.” This stopped the bed from shaking. I'm not sure if she slept after that, but I know it was years before she started talking about it.
A few years later, in the 1990s, she visited us again. I have since been given one of the larger bedrooms at the front of the house and my aunt reluctantly had to utilize my ancient bedroom which has since become a spare room. She woke up in the middle of the night and saw a woman in a bonnet at the bottom of the bed, watching her. I never heard what else happened.
